The Latest

Here is what Mark Lines (Unified Process Mentors, Co-Founder) has to say:

The fact that basic agile concepts are so easy to learn, as well as the proliferation of certification courses with very little investment required has had both positive and negative effects. Certainly the mindshare of methods such as Scrum has exploded in our industry and people are excited about the benefits that agile can deliver in terms of elimination of waste and timely delivery of systems with immediate ROI.

Agile embraces the concept of self-organizing teams but they are inherently unstable and are only successful when the ‘Leadership – Self-Management’ dilemma is understood and dealt with. Too much central control destroys agility, inhibits creativity and resists change. Too much self-management leads to chaos and anarchy and destroys a team. A successful Agile Team needs to operate as far along the continuum towards self-management as it can, without tipping over into chaos. You can’t just eliminate the PM role and say to a software development team, “OK, you’re now an Agile Team – you need to self-organize”. This is a recipe for failure, and one of the reasons why many organizations resist the Agile approach.

Complaints in the workplace about insufficient or inadequate communication are common, yet that very word "communication" is subject to multiple interpretations.

Here's an example of what I mean: A director had a survey conducted to determine the cause of his employees' low morale. One of the key findings was their desire for more communication. Eager to put things right, the director began circulating more reports and email than ever. And as a voracious reader, he started to extract articles from his many periodicals and circulate them to everyone.

If you're practicing agile methods but continue to reach back to the rules and structures your organization used before adopting agile, you might be asking for more trouble than you know. In this article, George Schlitz discusses the mingling of old and new rules in organizations in different phases of agile adoption and offers a four-step method to help sort out the confusion.

If you are anything like me, you have a to-do list a mile long. Because I work for myself, I have an integrated list of everything I need to do: projects for clients, books to write, articles to write, columns to write, presents to buy, house maintenance, clothes to organize, office cleanup. The list is long and never-ending.

Joe Krebs discusses why soft skills factors, honesty and integrity are not only essential among team members, but also for entire enterprises—including their portfolios.